The Sony Spider-Villain series goes out on top (sort of) with Kraven The Hunter

The mission of the Spidey Universe of Cinematic Killers at Sony, commonly known as SUCKS, has been completed. Venom has been unleashed, some profits have been made, the character license has been extended, and Dakota Johnson has successfully avoided drinking a Pepsi. This means that Kraven—you guys know Kraven? Kraven, the Hunter?—enters a lame-duck term. Kraven The Hunter, the movie and the character, are cursed to wander the earth, but mainly the outskirts of Russia, teasing sequels and/or heel turns and/or inexplicable grudges against Spider-Man that will likely never be fulfilled, at least not with franchise nomad Aaron Taylor-Johnson in what he might have once hoped would become his signature role.

As with Venom and Morbius, robbing Kraven of conflict with Spider-Man mostly means that he shifts from genuine supervillain to semi-generic anti-hero—a superpowered type who kills goons without compunction, but mostly for righteous reasons. If anything, this version of Kraven is even more upright than his predecessors in SUCKS, who at least have nominally monstrous urges to grapple with. Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven, also known as Sergei, is more human: the son of Russian gangster Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe, resplendent in his accented hamminess), he suffers a lion attack on one of his father’s signature big game hunts. That teenage mishap is also how he first encounters Calypso, who becomes his childhood sweetheart—in the sense that she anonymously slips him the magical potion that saves his life and, mixed with the lion’s blood, gives him super-strength, glowing eyes, an unspoken kinship with other mammals, and wall-climbing agility. (You know, like a lion.)

Disgusted with his father and armed with his newfound powers, Sergei runs away from home, leaving his meeker half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) to deal with Nikolai’s unpleasantness. Eventually Sergei takes on the vigilante identity of Kraven, hunting down the very criminals that his father associates with and periodically checking in on his lounge-singing brother (a suspiciously gifted mimic; hmm…). When rival gangster Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola) who, let’s not beat around the bush, is nicknamed Rhino, comes after Dmitri, Rhino moves way up on Kraven’s death list. For reasons not entirely clear, Kraven also enlists the help of Calypso (Ariana DeBose) in his tracking of bad guys, despite his boasting that no one can do it better than he can.

It doesn’t seem that hard, because while the settings of Kraven The Hunter are far-flung, including Ghana, Siberia, and London, the world of the movie is relatively small, and Kraven doesn’t exactly set about to save it. He’s the son of a gangster, mostly killing other gangsters, and that seedy crime-family milieu fits slumming director J.C. Chandor quite well. In fact, in easily the greatest twist in SUCKS history, it turns out that if you can detach yourself from behind-the-scenes questions of whether a superhero movie unlikely to inspire sequels becomes definitionally pointless (always a struggle point for the contemporary comics nerd), Kraven The Hunter is a lot of fun.

Well, maybe “a lot” is subject to expectations. But while all of the previous movies in this barely-series seemed scrambled together in a panic, Chandor’s movie seems scrambled together with a great deal of confidence and a bit of style. Like a lot of franchise films, some of its more memorable images seem to be broken up by demands for coverage, but at least this has some that aren’t pure splash-panel geek bait: a shot of the brothers silhouetted in the wilderness; the yellow-brown interiors of Nikolai’s club, which resembles sets from Chandor’s A Most Violent Year; the scrappy, slam-bang way that Kraven takes corners when in hot and barefoot pursuit of his prey. Chandor shoots with an eye toward the widescreen frame, rather than a moron-enticing sizzle reel.

That doesn’t exempt Kraven The Hunter from plenty of dumb and/or ridiculous turns. There’s at least one comics C-lister too many (for no reason, Christopher Abbott IS… The Foreigner!), and the movie has no earthly idea what to do with Ariana DeBose when Calypso—nominally a lawyer!—isn’t providing voodoo potions. (For the movie’s grand finale, she outright disappears, never to be seen again.) The difference between this and, say, Morbius or even a Venom is that Kraven’s dumb stuff is efficient and coherent, with the punched-up quippiness kept to a bare minimum. It’s amusing but not shocking to see that Richard Wenk, go-to old-fashioned action author of the Equalizer movies and The Protégé, among others, has a credit on the screenplay; this alleged superhero movie concerns itself mostly with characters sneaking into different bases for various nabbings, rescues, and some satisfyingly nasty killings (albeit suffering from the CG gore problem that plagues almost all click-to-bleed R-rated mega-productions).

Obviously, viewers’ amusement and affection may vary. When Chandor does the “hand lightly caressing grass” shot as young Kraven is carried to his potential doom in the jaws of a CG lion; when Calypso reacts to almost everything in this movie with ridiculous nonchalance and appears to pack a change of superhero clothes with her on the lam from gangsters; when Nivola out-hams Crowe by transforming into yet another dark-mirror version of Spider-Man; and during plenty of other moments, some will probably howl with derision. This may, however, have more to do with big-ticket superhero movies obliterating memories of the cheaper B-movies that this one recalls. Kraven The Hunter gets closer than any of its predecessors to understanding the silly, entertaining freedom of shedding continuity. Then again, maybe it’s best that this misbegotten series quits while it’s just-barely ahead. Part of the fun of Kraven The Hunter is knowing that when it’s over, it’s over.

Director: J.C. Chandor
Writer: Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Alessandro Nivola, Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe, Fred Hechinger, Christopher Abbott
Release date: December 13, 2024